can we fail to
form an idea of beauty and know surely when we meet with loveliness?

Here is a sonnet eloquent of a blind man's power of vision:

THE MOUNTAIN TO THE PINE

Thou tall, majestic monarch of the wood,
That standest where no wild vines dare to creep,
Men call thee old, and say that thou hast stood
A century upon my rugged steep;
Yet unto me thy life is but a day,
When I recall the things that I have seen,--
The forest monarchs that have passed away
Upon the spot where first I saw thy green;
For I am older than the age of man,
Or all the living things that crawl or creep,
Or birds of air, or creatures of the deep;
I was the first dim outline of God's plan:
Only the waters of the restless sea
And the infinite stars in heaven are old to me.

I am glad my friend Mr. Stedman knew that poem while he was making his
Anthology, for knowing it, so fine a poet and critic could not fail to
give it a place in his treasure-house of American poetry. The poet, Mr.
Clarence Hawkes, has been blind since childhood; yet he finds in nature
hints of combinations for his mental pictures. Out of the knowledge and
impressions that come to him he constructs a masterpiece which hangs
upon the walls of his thought. And into the poet's house come all the
true spirits of the world.

It was a rare poet who thought of the mountain as "the first dim outline
of God's plan." That is the real wonder of the poem, and not that a
blind man should speak so confidently of sky and sea. Our ideas of the
sky are an accumulation of touch-glimpses, literary allusions, and the
observations of others, with an emotional blending of all. My face feels
only a tiny portion of the atmosphere; but I go through continuous space
and feel the air at every point, every instant. I have been told about
the distances from our earth to the sun, to the other planets, and to
the fixed stars. I multiply a thousand times the utmost height and width
that my touch compasses, and thus I gain a deep sense of the sky's
immensity.

Move me along constantly over water, water, nothing but water, and you
give me the solitude, the vastness of ocean which fills the eye. I have
been in a little sail-boat on the sea, when the rising tide swept it
toward the shore. May I not understand the poet's figure: "The